From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC:

Mary Lou Reker:
Hello.  My name is Mary Lou Reker, and on behalf of the Library of Congress Office of Scholarly Programs and the Kluge Center, I wish to welcome you today to a lecture by Dr. Joanna Bachman [spelled phonetically], entitled "Yugoslav Socialist and Latin America: The Left-Wing Origins of Neo-Liberalism." Dr. Joanna Bachman is an historical sociologist who received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego, in the year 2000.  As an undergraduate, with a semester abroad in Hungary, her interest was sparked in socialism and its relationship to neo-liberalism.  And to accomplish her research in the globalization of economic theory, she added Hungarian, Italian, Spanish and Russian as well as a reading ability in Bosnian, Croation, Serbian to her language skills.  

Currently an Assistant Professor of sociology and global affairs at George Mason University, Dr. Bachman was, from 2004 to 2007, also co-prinicple investigator of the U.S.  Department of Education project in globalization and Central Asia.  In addition to honors and awards, she has also had a number of publications.  Her book, The Socialist Origins of Neo-Liberalism, is now in manuscript form, and she has published in a variety of journals, including, for example, The American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Theory and Society.  

She is also the book review editor of H Net's Post-Socialist Cultural Studies discussion forum, known as H-Soyuz [spelled phonetically].  

Dr. Bachman's research at the Kluge Center recognizes that one nation's policy choices are far from being the sole influence on Latin America.  And her research poses the question, in what way are a dialogue of theories impacting the development of any system, that combines pro-market forces with worker's self-managed socialism? I want to quote from the Library of Congress' Kluge Web page, because I think it's really apropos here.  When it says "in an age where power and influence depend increasingly on knowledge, citizens and their leaders must rely more on wits than weapons to sustain global progress.  Leaders need to tap the wisdom of scholars whose judgment and objectivity will bring fresh perspectives to government." To bring us some fresh perspectives today, we welcome Dr. Joanna Bachman.

[applause]

Joanna Bachman: 
Okay.  So, what I wanted to do, first of all, is I wanted to talk about the title, and give it as an introduction to what I'm trying to do.  And so, first of all, there is this confusing term of neo-liberalism.  People use it in a variety of ways, and what I want to talk about first is my meaning of neo-liberalism.  I take sort of an economic perspective on it.  Instead of ideas and policies that perceive the state as harmful and wasteful, and the free-market should replace the state.  So it's an anti-state, pro-free market kind of ideology, is what people often perceive it as.  It's also perceived, generally, by the literature, as originating from right-wing groups, because it's often identified with free-market capitalism, so it's often identified with right-wing, and it's also assumed to originate from the United States, because the United States, perceived as the center of sort of free-market capitalism, therefore these ideas must come from the United States.  

Okay, I want to explain, just briefly, about who I study, and why I study them.  I actually study economists, I'm a sociologist, I study economists.  I study mainstream economists, because a lot of people don't actually understand them very well.  And the thing about economists is that they often create our language, and our images for understanding the economy.  The economy is no real thing.  It's created by history, we have the idea that there is the economy, the economy can change over time, it might be the national economy, or the American economy, may become the global economy, so our notions of how we understand what the economy is is often created by economists.  Economists also make policy for the state.  So, they are very important in how the economy is shaped, so the economy is shaped by policy and by human actors.  

So I take sort of a social constructivist view about the economy.  Also, as I said, economists are frequently misunderstood.  I've also found that economists don't really care that they're misunderstood.  But, I care to make them clear what they're trying to do, somewhat clearer.  I read actual professional writings by economists.  I don't read, I'm not very interested in their ideological texts, I like reading their things and economic journals and stuff like that.  I also spend a lot of time interviewing economists.  I sit for many many hours, asking them over and over again, what do you mean by this word, what do you mean  by that word, so I spend a lot of time interviewing economists, and that drives my research into the archives.  I go to government archives, I go to the Ford Foundation [spelled phonetically] archives, I go to university archives, around the world.  So, I've done that kind of work, specifically in Hungary, Italy, the United States and the former Yugoslavia.  My work on Chile and Peru is mainly through secondary sources, and my research in the Yugoslav archives, which are now Belgrade.  And one of my main findings is, is that mainstream economists believe in the market, but they differ over the institutions necessary for a functioning efficient market.  

These distinctions about institutions are not these little things we hear about, like, oh these economists, well, maybe we should have a slight change in regulation here or there, the regulation of the SEC, or we should do something a little new there, tweak it there, tweak it here, these institutions are actually fundamental, they are fundamentally different.  Economists fundamentally disagree about the institutions that are required.  This is a highly politicized debate, and there's a huge amount of conflict among economists over what these institutions will be.  And I think you get a sense of why this is so contentious, through this talk.  

Okay, so, I also want to talk about what I mean about Latin America, and what I mean by left-wing.  Latin  America, I am specifically talking about Chile and Peru.  We could also talk about other countries, I just happen to find these two particularly interesting.  They have a history of having left-wing governments.  Chile had the Allende government, was voted into power in 1970, and it lasted until '73, when there was a military coup by Pinochet.  Pinochet stayed in power until 1990.  And was replaced through a democratic election.  In Peru, the General Velasco [spelled phonetically] had a military coup in 1968, and took power.  This, Peru was a very exciting case for people, because this was a military coup that implemented what he called a revolutionary government.  It was very much inspired by left-wing ideas.  And he stayed in power until '75.  In '75, there was another coup, another part of the military decided to take over the government, and that military stayed in power until 1980.  That military government was less left-wing than the original Velasco government, and then in 1980, there were democratic elections.  

Okay, the thing that people often think about, if they know anything about economists in Latin America, they might know about the Chicago Boys.  The Chicago Boys were 26 to 30, there's some debate about how many there were, but they were Chileans predominantly, who received U.S.  Government and later the Ford Foundation funding for graduate training at the University of Chicago's economics department.  It was very important that they studied at the University of Chicago.  The University of Chicago is very, very well known for its pro-free market, and often huge criticisms of the state.  One of the most famous economists at the University of Chicago is Milton Friedman, was Milton Friedman.  They are known, among most scholars, as being a very neo-liberal department.  And so it would be natural to think of them as promoting sort of neo-liberal ideas.  

The students who studied at the University of Chicago then returned to Chile.  There were also other students from other countries, and they also were studied in the same way through this program.  They return to Chile, they became professors and brought the curriculum they had at the Unversity of Chicago to Chile, and they taught their students.  They also, especially after 1973, some number of them became very influential in the Pinochet Regime and created the economic policies there.  And this was created, really, the very first case of a neo-liberal experiment in the entire world.  So Chile was the center of a neo-liberal experiment.  And therefore, people often understand that the University of Chicago is the right-wing origin of neo-liberalism.  Now, I think that the story has many true components to it.  But it also neglects some very important aspects about neo-liberalism.

Okay, so I'm going to talk about, before I get to that, Yugoslav socialism.  As some people might not know, the Yugoslavia was a socialist country after World War II, and up until 1991.  It was led by a very charismatic leader, Marshall Tito [spelled phonetically], he was very popular around the world, and what was also very important about Yugoslavia was that Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet bloc almost immediately.  So, in 1948, Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, kicked Yugoslavia out of the Soviet bloc, and said you're on your own.  

So this actually led Yugoslavia into amuch different direction than any other country in the east bloc.  And they had special qualities of Yugoslav socialism.  First of all, Yugoslav socialism, because of this experience, was very anti-Soviet.  Very critical of the Soviet system.  The Soviet system, in the perception of the Yugoslavs, was central planning, socialism, it was the state-controlled all the means of production, it was very hierarchical, the party at the top controlling everything all the way down, and it was, there was no private property, and it was very hierarchical, is the most important part.  

This led to the Yugoslav criticism of the Soviet Union, and its etatism.  This is an idea that the state was part of the problem.  The state was very bureaucratic in general, all states, according to the Yugoslav model, so they were critical not only of state socialism, but also critical of state capitalism.  They saw America as a state capitalist society, America was also dominated by a bureaucratic state, but also dominated by very bureaucratic, large-scale corporations, so that corporations were also part of the problem as well.  They were for worker's self-management, and I ought to be clear about what workers self-management was.  We have an, we have some understanding today of worker ownership, which is different than worker self-management.  Today, we know that General Motors and Chrysler are owned, in some percentage, by the employees of those companies.  But we have to make a distinction that those employees own shares, but they actually have almost no input into the decision-making of the companies they work for.

So that is worker ownership.  In Yugoslavia, they had worker self-management.  The workers could actually make, decide who would be manager, they could decide on wages, they could decide on plans for the factory, and a variety of other things.  But also, what I'm trying to talk about here is also the intention of it.  It also wasn't realized, and it's the form that people wanted, but the intention was to have this worker self-management.  And another important and interesting aspect to the Yugoslav model was it was also for, an idea of a free market.  This was not always realized, it was often criticized in Yugoslavia, but there was an original idea that the market would be this place where you would get rid of the state, you would have these companies that were controlled by the workers, they would compete with each other on the free market, they would be small enough, they wouldn't be this big corporations, they'd be small enough that they could actually compete, and it would make a very efficient market, it would actually, in the minds of the Yugoslavs and also the minds of others, if you had this system, you would actually have a free market that could never be attained in capitalism.  

This was an idea that actually free markets were more attainable in socialism than they were in capitalism.  Okay, so that's the Yugoslav model, and it's sort of intentioned.  Okay.  Just one second, let me drink water.  I want to return to just one of the problems people have with understanding what's going on in this topic of economists.  Is we have an idea that neo-liberalism is anti-state and pro-free market.  And there's this idea that Yugoslav socialism was just an alternate form of socialism, so there's alternative socialism, and they also, strangely, have this kind of anti-state and pro-free market quality.  It seems strange to us today, but it was, this is the way, there was a lot of economists around the world that believed this, that you could have socialism with a market, and to dismantle the state.  

Okay, what happens then is that I want to make a distinction between these two things, because people often conflate the two of them.  And we'll see that in this talk about how people get confused and move between both of them.  So, the, what makes these two kinds of policies different, are the institutions that are required to make the free market actually work.  Under neo-liberalism, we have privatization, according to neo-liberal ideas and often right-wing ideas of privatization, the means of production must be privatized, big corporations are okay to people that are neo-liberal economists, and hierarchical management is also very important.  What I mean by hierarchical management is, there's one manager, and the manager makes decisions that go all the way down.

Okay, in the company.  And also, what's also important is that they see that the income distribution  that we have today is totally fine.  Now, this is different than ideas about socialism, which look very similar, pro-free market, very anti-state, but in alternative socialisms, you have a variety of ownership types.  And so you have things like social property.  Now, let me explain what social property is.  In the Yugoslav model, which isn't want I'm talking about here, about alternative socialisms, is that they have this idea that you would have, instead of, since you want to dismantle the state, you want to move state property out of the state, and move it into something they call social property.  So all of society owned it.  That meant that the companies were owned by all of society.  There were workers that controlled the inside of the factory, but these workers had the right to use the factories.  They had also the right to take any of the profits that were made.  They could take those profits and do, either give them away as wages, or they could also invest it in some now, whatever they wanted to do, they could invest it in another corporation or invest it in their factory.  

So, under this idea of Yugoslav socialism, there were these varieties of ownership types that would be possible.  There was also an idea that you wanted to create competitive companies.  Neo-liberal economists say that's not necessary, but Yugoslav economists would have said, yes, you have to have competitive companies, and that means you have to make them small enough so they can be competing with each other.  If you have these big monopolies, then those big monopolies aren't going to be able to compete with anybody.  They're just going to dominate the market.

So this is very important to socialist economists.  It seems weird, to us today, because why would socialist economists be interested in such things, they sound kind of capitalist.  And that's part of the problem, they misunderstand where they're coming from.  Another aspect I said before is worker self-management, and this is in opposition to the hierarchical management and the other side, and income redistribution is also very popular among socialist economists, and that goes in that contrast with the neo-liberal position saying you don't need to redistribute income.  

Okay, so, we'll move to, oh, one more thing.  Is, interestingly, neo-liberal and Soviet socialism actually have some surprising similarities.  First of all, in neo-liberalism, the anti-state ideology is actually in order to realize these markets, they have to have a very strong state.  And they also have big corporations who are very much supported by the Soviet regime, was very much into very large companies, and the Soviet regime was also very interested in the hierarchical management, and even though we think the Soviet Union was an egalitarian society and in fact, income distribution was quite unequal, it was wasn't quite as unequal as it was in the United States or in other parts of the world, but it was not, there were many layers of inequality.

Okay.  So, one more thing, it's very important, before I move to the part about Latin America, is that Yugoslavia is one of the founders of the non-align movement [spelled phonetically].  The non-align movement was during the Cold War, we lived in a bipolar world.  On the one side was the Soviet Union, with its state centrally planned, socialism, on the other side, was the United States, which is supposedly free-market capitalism, or maybe it's state capitalism, depending on your point of view.  Yugoslavia and other smaller countries realized that they were being pulled both ways by these different poles in the Cold War, and they wanted to go their own route, and they knew the only way to go your own route was to bind together, to work together, and to actually try to forge something new.  This was an incredibly difficult thing to do.  There were many differences of opinion in the non-align movement, but it was, it was in existence.  And the thing about it is, that Yugoslavia was very important because it provided a lot of technical and educational assistance to the third world, developing countries, generally.  I have some data on this.  

Between 1954 and 1967, about 2500 Yugoslav experts were spent to 32 developing countries.  2400 citizens from 75 developing countries attended courses in Yugoslav government, paid by the Yugoslav government.  2,000 students attended Yugoslav courses for which they themselves or their governments paid.  There were several thousands of experts sent abroad by Yugoslav companies, and there was also various forms of military systems, liberation movements around the world.  And this data is merely from the early period.  Things just get going in the 70's, and there's lots more assistance going on.  The idea was that there would be technical assistance, and there would also be attempts to have trade, beneficial trade amongst each other; it was this idea that if we cooperate together, we might actually be better off in the long run.  

Okay, so that's my introduction.  I wanted to talk a little bit about three things.  Yugoslav influence in Chile, the Yugoslav influence in Peru, and then just talk a little bit about neo-liberalism in Chile and Peru after 1989.  

Okay, so the Yugoslav influence in Chile: Chilean socialists and communists were already in contact with the Yugoslavs in the 1950's.  This is kind of a usual thing: countries that have a communist party or a socialist party would often go to large-scale congresses in Yugoslavia or Hungary or the Soviet Union, and then these countries would send people to come and observe the congresses in Peru or in Chile or whatever.  So there was the usual thing.  The thing that's usual about this, is that it meant that these Chileans had some idea about what was going on in Yugoslavia.  They may not know about the reality of it, but they knew something about the ideas that were going on.  

In 1968, as I said, the Velasco revolutionary government came to power.  And  in 1969, Yar Sobvonic [spelled phonetically] visited Chile.  Now, no one knows who Yar Sobvonic is here, but a couple of people do.  But Yar Sobvonic, he is one of many vectors of Yugoslav socialism, he was, in fact, a Czech ŽmigrŽ to the United States.  The thing about Yar Sobvonic is he's actually a great example about how the Yugoslav model dislodged itself from Yugoslavia, and kind of spread, independently.  And one of those independent areas is Yar Sobvonic, he's a Czech ŽmigrŽ to the United States, he's a very famous Cornell University economics professor.  He was a mainstream economist, he became very, very famous for his work in international trade, and what happened was, is that in the early 1960's, his brother, Jan [spelled phonetically] worked for the International Labor Organization, and had learned about the Yugoslav model.  And he wrote a book on it.  And Yar Sobvonic learned about this, and thought it was the greatest thing.  So he became a convert to the Yugoslav model.  

And the thing about Yar Sobvonic's, and other economists, what they did is they actually translated the Yugoslav model into American neo-classical economics.  So economists in the United States and also in other countries actually, not only understood better what the Yugoslav model was trying to do, but also felt that the Yugoslav model actually was completely relevant to American economics.  It became a completely relevant thing to other economics in Britain, economics in Germany all these different places.  So that was a very interesting thing that he had done.  He was also, as I said, or as it says here, he was an advisor to the Chilean and the Peruvian governments on several occasions.  

So, he, in 1969, he visits Santiago, Chile, and he actually gives a two-week course at the Catholic University, which is actually, in fact, the university where the Chicago Boys teach.  And in fact it was sponsored by the Chicago Boys' economics department.  And he was brought in for two weeks to talk about an abstract model of the Yugoslav economy.  He was, it was, it went on every evening for two weeks.  There were 30 economists, some of the most famous economists in Chile were in attendance.  And they said it was incredibly exciting.  Everyone was so excited about it, because at this point in time in Chile, the Yugoslav model, everybody is completely fascinated by it.  

So, this is someone reporting on being at this course.  He said "whatever might reasonably have been hoped for from the Sobvonic visit, dialogue, intellectuals and academics of different camps, constructive and serious debate on a viano capitalista [spelled phonetically] increased openness, if not convergence in some cases, to a third way of development, has been achieved, and overachieved.  

So there was a huge amount of excitement in the room.  This writer goes on to say that he thinks everybody's converted, there's going to be classes about this, there's going to be all these things.  So everybody's excited.

Another place of sort of a vector of Yugoslav socialism, was C Plan [spelled phonetically].  The center for national planning studies, also in Santiago, Chile.  It was originally formed out of the Office of National Planning  in the government, and it was also emerged out of a workshop on socialism, that was very, very popular.  This center was established in the early 1970, and it was funded by the Ford Foundation, which is also the funders of the Chicago Boys.  

And C Plan showed early on, the members of C Plan were interested in Yugoslavia.  Almost all the staff members had visited Yugoslavia at some point, in the early days, the director, Alejandro Foxley [spelled phonetically], was a resident of Yugoslavia for a month with four other members of C Plan, but he also, even before he heard Vonic [spelled phonetically] speak, had been incredibly interested by worker self-management.  And so, also, what happened was a Broncal Horvath [spelled phonetically], who I'll show you in just one second, visited for six weeks and gave a seminar on stratification in 1972, and that's, let me just show you, I think I have him here.  Here's Broncal Horvath, he was a Yugoslav economist, in fact, we can all say, the most famous Yugoslav economist, he was mainstream trained, he was trained at Manchester, and he was the founder of Belgrade's Institute of Economic Sciences, and he taught all around the world.  He was a visiting professor at Yale, a visiting professor at Michigan, and so on and so on.  He was a definite advocate of the Yugoslav model, and he, like Vonic, was able to translate the Yugoslav model into conventional economic science.  It made people very, very interested, and he became a very much, a desirable person to have around in a department, or to bring in as an advisor.  So he was an advisor to Chile and Peru also.

Okay, I just want to go back to the previous screen I had.  So, C Plan organized conferences and publications on socialism, and this book that was published, this was a result of an enormously popular workshop, and this book actually sold out almost immediately, and there were two more publications of this.  So, in this book, everywhere in it is Yugoslavian socialism.  They talk about Yugoslavia this, Yugoslavia that, they do this there, and things like that.  Also, C Plan taught courses on socialism, planning social systems and macroeconomics.  

Okay, so we have some sense of the Yugoslav influence in Chile.  And there's Broncal Horvath again.  And the Yugoslav influence in Chile had several consequences.  One is, is that in Chile they're about to be, they got to be part of a transnational dialogue about socialism, so this is a very particular thing.  It wasn't just, sort of Marxist activism, but it was actually economic dialogue.  And this economic dialogue took on very important qualities.  This dialogue was about decentralization, not centralization but decentralization, and so worldwide economists were very interested in how to decentralize planning.  This was in the United States, most American economists were interested in decentralized planning as well.  

Also, they were interested, this discussion was about to have a market in socialism.  Today it seems strange to us, but back in that time, it was seen as quite normal.  Also, the idea of democracy, how could you have a socialist democracy? And that democracy had special qualities.

Okay, Peru.  Peruvians had contact with Yugoslavia since the 1950's as well, which makes sense, it's the non-align movement is going full-bore at this time.  OPERA [spelled phonetically], which is the progressive party in Peru, the leader of it, visited Yugoslavia in 1957.  Parliamentary leaders also visited in 1959, and one of the parliamentary leaders said, "I am a Marxist communist, I am completely interested in the Yugoslav model, I want to know more about worker self-management," and he also said he was interested in places like China, and other places of socialist experimentation.  

As I said before, Vonic and Horvath were advisors, and, let's see, in the Yugoslav archives, I was able to come across the request by the Peruvian government to Yugoslavia for experts.  They asked for experts for all sorts of things.  Agricultural experts, industrial experts, they wanted someone to help with their metal industry, they wanted someone to help with their fisheries industry, and all sorts of different things.  I was particular interested in their requests for economic experts.  So, Peru asked, for example, asked in 1970 to have contact with Yugoslav institutes and to obtain publications on planning and on the economic developments in Yugoslavia.  

In 1974, there was a Peruvian request for at least three Yugoslav experts of finance and planning, including one to directly advise Velasco, the general, the head of the government.  They said that the ambassador had told them, specifically, to be very, very careful in the choice of the expert to Velasco.  Because they said that they didn't want to have someone who looked too obvious, like, looked like a government official, they wanted someone who could kind of hide in the background, because they said "we don't want to look like we're changing the entire economy of Peru, when in fact they felt, the Yugoslavs felt they were doing that.  In 1974, the reason they needed to have Yugoslav experts and other people interested, was because they implemented a new law.  This new law was the law on social property.  The social property law was actually to implement a bunch of worker self-management companies, and create an entire sector that would do this, and would have the financial systems to make this actually work, and to make the planning systems that they had to have it actually work.   

So, Peru was incredibly interested in actually having Yugoslavia help them, because they actually had experience with this.  Scholars who have written about this have said that this, that what laws they put into effect, were almost exactly the same as the ones in Yugoslavia.  So, they were definitely taking ideas from Yugoslavia.  The, in June, 1975, this is before Velasco's still in power, there's going to be a coup later, but the national commission on social property makes a request to Yugoslavia, asks for five economists for specific industries, three planning experts, two experts who are going to help organize a research institute to study the social sector, and they ask for 20 fellowships for individuals to study in Yugoslavia.  They also want to do two month trips for four groups of people to visit Yugoslav factories, and they also want materials about Yugoslav experiences in Spanish or Serbo-Croatian.  

So, it was a great deal in the Yugoslav model to help run this idea of social property and social ownership.  Okay.  The other thing that is very, very important to the story of the influence of Yugoslavia is that the Ford Foundation was actually sending Peruvians to Yugoslavia.  The Ford Foundation wanted, it though, like, if Peru is going to implement a system that looks like Yugoslavia, then they might as well have them go look at Yugoslavia, see what's going to work best.  And so one of the things that Peruvians were particularly concerned about was that they were creating these new companies, and there was these worker-owned companies, but they had absolutely no experience in the management of these companies-how do you manage this company? It's totally different than your conventional corporation.  

You need to figure out how do deal with workers, what decisions they can make, what decisions are put on other realms, all of these things were very confusing to people.  So, the Ford Foundation set up an exchange program to send Peruvians from their faculty members from the Esan [spelled phonetically] Graduate Business School in Lima, Peru, and sent them to Yugoslavia.  For different periods of time, to actually study the Yugoslav system.  There also were examples of individuals in other parts of the government, who were sent to Yugoslavia.  For example, Rene Rodriguez [spelled phonetically] was the social property head in the ministry of industry and commerce, and he spent time in Yugoslavia.  

Also, what's very important to the influence of Yugoslavia on Peru and other places, was that the Ford Foundation was actually maintaining  contacts between people that were interested in the same topic of worker self-management.  There were people, in fact, in the Ford Foundation, incredibly excited about worker self-management, and they would go to Chile and say "oh my gosh, these people are so excited, and those people." And so those people would get them to come and meet with other people, so, for example, Chilean worker self-management officials were brought to Peru to talk about what was going on in Chile and vice-versa.  

Okay.  The consequences were a little different for Peru than Chile.  One of the similar consequences is that Peru became also part of a transnational dialogue about socialism, how these varieties of socialism might actually exist.  The thing that's so special about Peru, is that Peru actually maintained, it didn't have a coup that implemented right-wing military government, but it retained somewhat of his left-wing perspective.  So, one of the important aspects about Peru is that it had a long-term connection with Yugoslavia though the non-alignment movement.  Peru had joined the non-alignment movement in 1973, and it sought to be a leader in the movement.  So Peru was often meeting with Yugoslavia, up through the 1980's, talking about what could a non-alignment movement become, what are these different things that are going on, and the other thing that's important for Peru is that it had actually long-term experience with Yugoslav-style institutions.  They had social property, they had cooperatives, they had participatory Democracy in some forms, in the factories, so they had some experience with what that was like.  

And that was very important for their future.  

Okay.  And-so, I'm coming now to the 1990's.  In both Chile and Peru, we have democratically-elected governments, but we have a socialist Yugoslavia has disappeared.  Both the socialist model in Yugoslavia disappeared, and the country fell apart.  And, at this time, there was this perception around the world, with the end of these socialist, Yugoslav socialism and other kinds of discussions, there was a perception that there were only two possibilities.  There was Soviet centrally-planned socialism, and there was American free-market capitalism.  These were the two options left over.  What happened was that this whole middle space of this discussion about alternative socialisms becomes forgotten.  And the Soviet model is no longer viable to most people, they're like, that's done with, and so what becomes very interesting is that many left-leaning governments actually implement neo-liberal policies.  So, I want to get, just finish up with talking about the problem related to this.  

One of the things is that, in reality, from my research, is that there were not these two options, there were in fact many options about what was possible.  And two, the transnational socialist dialogue was, in fact, after the fact, re-interpreted as being capitalist, and also thus being neo-liberal.  So, these ideas, let me just show you this chart again, and you can see here, that you can easily see that alternative socialisms can be misunderstood as being capitalist; they are very pro-market, anti-state, they talk about things that sound kind of capitalist, so what happened was that many people, especially people involved with the right-wing foundations and organizations, would misinterpret this socialism as actually an argument for capitalism.  And so, there became a misunderstanding.  This is also a misunderstanding on the left.  It's very understandable on the left as well, there was always a criticism of the market on the left.  

But among economists on the left, there was an interest in markets and socialism.  And so, the misunderstanding was partially a misunderstanding of economist's ideas themselves.  Okay.  One other thing, then, is that my argument is finally, that socialism continues today.  Now, this is very, very obvious in some sense, and not, what I mean by this, I don't mean that these accusations of President Obama, that he is a socialist.  That is a very, that's related back to this whole idea that the Soviet socialism, ownership by the state, that's the kind of socialism I'm talking about.  In fact, we can see that, for example, interesting strange kinds of socialism in Latin America today.  We look at Lula in Brazil, we see very different in Chavez in Venezuela, but I don't even mean that.  I actually mean something very specific.  

That socialism, in this alternative form, in this discussions that it had, continues on in capitalism today.  So that the socialist ideas that were developed led, in some sense, to the new forms of capitalism we experience today.  Antonio Negri, an Italian communist, and his colleague, an American Michael Hardt, wrote a booked called "Empire." And in Empire, they talk about how there is a communist, the communism of capitalism, that in fact, the current state of capitalism has very many communist-type qualities.  

And so, there's this idea that in fact, socialism of this very particular anti-Soviet sort, lives on in the form of capitalism we have today.  And, in the ideas of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, there's a sense of Marxist view, one can say, on the one hand, that there is a convergence of socialism and capitalism, that's one way to think of it, as strange convergence that we miss, we did not see, another one is to have a Marxist view, that they're going to move through capitalism, and get to communism.  Depends on your perspective.  So, thank you very much.

[applause]

This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.  

 [end of transcript]